Unless you've been living in a box for the last few years, you will be aware of odd goings on in Google land, and webmasters panicking about Penguins and Pandas.
Even if you have no idea what people are talking about, it should be quite obvious that this Search Engine Optimisation lark is strewn with dangers and odd penalties if you upset Google.
Well at least they can't be accused of not picking on everyone, and a few high profile large Businesses have now been caught in Googles spam net, the latest being none other than the Halifax Bank!
It seems they have had a bit of a shady link building campaign, and have put a lot of effort into distributing handy widgets for blogs and websites, which have some nice links all pointing back to Halifax, laden with salesy type keywords.
To be fair, this was deemed to be an acceptable practice not so long ago, but thats another link building avenue well and truly shut!
If you do want to distribute widgets on peoples sites, then the Google rule seems to be ensure they are "nofollow", in other words, they have a bit of code next to them that tell the Google robots that scour the web looking for links, to clear off and ignore me.
If you want to see any more about this, then the full Halifax report can be found here:
Halifax.co.uk: Big Brands not Immune to Google SEO Penalty (250%)
I think that Google is merely trying to work for their customers, not the companies trying to make money form being at the top of the search list there. They need to constantly update their algorithm to stay at the top of the market. From the webmaster / SEO analyst point of view, it's a real nightmare. However, given the number of daily searches we all perform, it would be an absolute disaster not to be able to find that relevant information, the best restaurant in town or a nearby garage. Spammers never sleep and they are ready to make money on each algorithm's fault. It's good that Google banns these people, but I wouldn't have ever thought it's going to touch the big companies. Thanks for bringing that on! Fixed Fee Legal Services | Bespoke Document Drafting | Document Templates
Seems strange to me that Google can retrospectively ban a practice it once deemed acceptable .... That being said wasnt smoking deemed acceptable by the masses not so long ago.......? Now soon you wont even be able to light up in your car with kids in it. How times change. Clive |
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